Serial Killers and Their Fathers

Art by K. Ramsland

In news media articles, I’ve seen speculation about the parents of Rex Heuermann, who's been charged in three of the four Gilgo Beach murders. A former high school classmate described him as a “momma's boy,” which some commentators believe means his mother was controlling. However, males can be close to their mothers without necessarily being cowed. As an adult, it seems that Heuermann takes charge, so more information is needed before eyeing his mother as a primary influence on his alleged violence.

The go-to formula is that serial killers with female victims have symbolically killed their mothers to assert the power the mothers had erased. Yet, fathers have had some impact as well on kids who later became killers. Their parenting, too, can be destabilizing.

A boyhood associate of Heuermann’s mentioned that he had a troubled relationship with his father, Ted, who died when Heuermann was 12. Again, we don’t know enough to speculate about the man’s level of influence, but research on paternal influence on kids at risk to become violent has been spotty.

Six years ago, I discussed mothers of murderers here. Let’s look at some fathers that seem to have had a hand in the development of childhood issues that fed mean streaks and a desire to kill.

One father actually wrote about it. Jeffrey Dahmer’s father, Lionel, endured the horror of learning that his son had murdered multiple young men and did bizarre things with their bodies. After attending the 1992 trial, Lionel wrote A Father’s Story to explore how he and his ex-wife, Joyce, might have contributed to Jeff’s deviancy. Lionel had been in his son’s apartment, so he was stunned to learn that police found Polaroid photos of dismembered males, pickled genitalia, heads in the refrigerator, and receptacles full of decomposing human remains. “…I allowed myself to believe Jeff,” Lionel mused, “to accept all his answers regardless of how implausible they might seem… I allowed myself to believe that there was a line in Jeff, a line he wouldn’t cross…” It became clear that Jeff had found a perverse form of refuge from his parents’ relentless bickering in animal experiments and sexual fantasies.

John Wayne Gacy murdered at least 33 young men during the 1970s. A high school friend recalled several instances in which Gacy’s father ridiculed or beat him without provocation. When, Gacy became involved in politics, working as an assistant precinct captain for a candidate, his father called him a patsy. It seemed he could never please the man.

Edmund Kemper III’s father not only rejected him but also betrayed him. Kemper’s parents had a stormy relationship, so they finally split up. We hear about Kemper’s mother, Clarnell, belittling him and forcing him to live in a basement room, but there's been little focus on what the other parent did. Clarnell found the adolescent Edmund dour and unmanageable, so she sent him, at his request, to live with his father and stepmother. But his father didn’t want this ungainly teen in his home, either, so over the Christmas holidays in 1963, he took his boy to his parents’ farm and left him there, effectively abandoning him. Young Edmund stayed for a while, bored and unhappy. He tried to reunite with his mother over the summer, but he ended up back at the farm. Eventually, he killed both grandparents. He was 15. (Later, he murdered eight females, including his mother.) Neglect, rejection, and humiliation from both parents likely played a role.

Danny Ranes grew up in a troubled family that produced two serial killers operating separately. His brother, Larry, 19, fatally shot four men in 1964. His victims resembled his abusive alcoholic father, who’d beaten his sons indiscriminately and made them fight each other nearly to the death. Then in 1972, Danny raped and killed a young mother before he enlisted a teenage accomplice in three more murders of young women.

Baker Robert Hansen, who murdered 17 women, often heard from his overbearing father that he was worthless. Acne-prone, insecure, and socially ostracized, Robert acted out by setting fires and assaulting women. He gained a sense of power from a fantasy life full of punitive images. Made to feel weak and incapable as a boy, he found ways to assert himself as an adult. He used his status as a businessman and family man in Alaska to get away with rape, kidnapping, and murder before police finally linked him to the buried corpses of women he’d hired for sex. He’d dismissed them as “bad women,” a way to elevate himself on the social scale. Childhood insecurity seems clearly to have played a role in how he targeted and treated them.

Whether mother or father, when parents belittle, abuse, humiliate, or subject their kids to other types of adverse treatment, they plant seeds in some for reactive attitudes that emerge in future violence.

Psychiatrist Dorothy Otnow Lewis and her associates compared nine males who’d been evaluated during adolescence and later committed murder to a group of 24 nonviolent incarcerated delinquents. Family trauma and parental brutality were key features in the killers’ backgrounds.

Cole and Anderson performed a qualitative study with five male and three female high school students who’d shown persistent antisocial aggression. They all had aggressive parents. A lack of father-son bonding, especially when the father was violent or absent, had a significant impact, as did rigid, assertive parenting from either parent.

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Labella and Masten confirm that risk factors for aggression and violence in children arise primarily from within the family system. There can be a genetic component, but contextual stressors like domestic conflict impact development, especially when there’s parental harshness or violence.

More research is needed to identify negative paternal influence on boys becoming killers, especially those who engage in repetitive serial murder.